The weather
In a heat situation
Stanley Reynolds
I'd like to fool, with My baby tonight, Break every rule, with my baby tonight. But, pillow, you'll be my baby tonight, 'Cos it's too dam hot
-Cole Porter There seems to be some conflicting opinion on this. I saw a headline saying: HEATWAVE RAPE TERROR STRIKES A CITY.
I pictured some sleazy tropical port. The dagoes driven mad with lust like the vicar in Somerset Maugham's Rain. Then I read the story under the headline. It was Sheffield, for crying out loud. No wonder Geoffrey Boycott wasn't playing for England.
At the same time we are being told that this heatwave is killing the sex drive in pigs and that pig farmers are in real trouble because of it.
You would have thought it would be a simple enough thing to clear up, but, apparently, no one even knows why it is so hot. I heard somebody saying it was the hot wind blowing over from the Sahara or some place. That is one theory. It doesn't seem particularly likely. I mean, it is hard to imagine all this hot air suddenly, and quite without precedence, blowing itself all the way across Africa and then across the blue water of the Med and down through Spain and southern France, crossing the high ridges of the Pyrenees and then huffing and puffing its way into the Channel and thence to us, just so headline writers could write, COR WHATTA SCORCHER!
It's kind of a long way for that hot African wind to travel just for that, although turning Sheffield into the heatwave-rape-terror capital of the world might make it almost worth it. (I should perhaps point out here that nothing is really happening up there in Yorkshire, it was simply a medical officer's poetic fancy about what might happen if the heat continues which gave birth to that headline.) The fickle wind theory was opposed by an even odder theory. I. am not too clear about this but apparently some scientists claim that this hot weather has come upon us because the ice up there at the North Pole, or wherever, is shrinking. I am pretty sure 'shrinking' is the word they used. I would have thought 'melting' is the word you'd use for ice. You don't, for example say, "The ice in my drink is shrinking," unless you are drunk. Maybe that's it. Maybe the scientists are drunk. It could possibly explain why only a few months ago they were saying we were having a cold spring because the ice up on the top of the world was expanding. I suppose they don't know any more than any of the rest of us do, and besides it is just too damned hot to bother sitting down and working out a lot of hard sums.
The hot weather,.however, has brought some amazingly swift changes in the national character. For several years now the girls have not really been wearing much in the way of clothing but in these past few weeks they have been wearing almost absolutely nothing at all (which could be the reason why thoughts of rape have strayed into the heads of otherwise staunch and conservative Yorkshiremen).. Ladies who would never ever have thought about going without a bra have abandoned their life-long held scruples and their bras as soon as the mercury reached 85. You also see people well, at least, teenagers going barefoot. It is a dicey business going barefoot in this nation of dog lovers, and yet they do.
Britain has become a sticky hot island of blue cloudless skies and exotic nights full of rumbling thunder and flashing lightning, peopled by a lascivious race of naked wantOns. I wonder what a Victorian missionary would think if some trick of time could have him arriving back from somewhere east of Suez into .heat-struck Britain this August?
For that matter I wonder what sort of impression the tourists are getting this season? They are certainly seeing a rare side of the British character. Their accounts when they get back to Ohio or Vermont of sun-browned natives going barefoot, naked and unashamed is going to jar with older tourists' recollections of a stiff and formal people.
Going native is such a gradual process you hardly realise it's happening to you. I just could not face a trip to the launderette in this weather and so the next thing I knew I didn't have any clean socks. I had been hanging on to the faith of my fathers and wearing a necktie, albeit a trifle loosened, but once I started walking about with no socks, well, a man who doesn't wear socks is liable to do anything. Besides, even though there are probably no rules laid down about this, I think it is perhaps more stylish when not wearing socks to abandon the necktie. The next thing is, naturally, the shirt and the shoes that go and before you know it you are diving off Tower Bridge for the tourists' half-dollar pieces.
1 am also, I have been reliably informed by the Daily Telegraph, liable to run amok or amuck. (My dictionary can't seem to make up its mind about that, Must be the weather.) Thus another side has been added to the character of the brown-limbed, half-naked Brit. Watch out tourists, we are liable to run about in a frenzied thirst for blood. It will make a change from walking along the front at Eastbourne or Bournemouth giving each other filthy looks.
Somehow I cannot actually believe the evidence of my own eyes. After all it wasn't so very long ago that the British went out East and dressed for dinner while all about them the natives ran amoq (yet another spelling). Now, in a handful of days, more than two centuries' of dressing for dinner and hanging around with mad dogs in the midday sun and generally having a good time being uncomfortable, well, it's all just blbwn away. They've gone all jungly wallah in Thames Ditton and, apparently, the sight of a white woman and they are utterly out of control, amok, amuck, amoq in Yorkshire.
But, of course, we know it's not going to last. I've no doubt we'll all be back in our socks and our bras before the month is out.
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